Reaper of Souls Highlights: New Visual Sets and Monster Affixes, DiabloFans Site Update Going Live Wednesday, PTR Might Be Comin

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Reaper of Souls Highlights: New Visual Sets and Monster Affixes

The next part of our improvised RoS Guide consists of a showcase of the new visual sets for all the classes that are accessible thanks to the transmogrification feature the Mystic offers. Keep in mind some of the sets you'll see are placeholders and won't look the same way once the expansion is live. The second part of today's post is a presentation of the 5 new monster affixes.

Also, here is the majority of the Crusader's sets. Some of them don't have all of the pieces and parts of the sets are 'improvised' by us:

New Monster Affixes

There are 5 new monster affixes. Some of them are kinda terrifying, while others are just annoying. We've gathered all of them and made some videos, so that you won't have to take our word for it.

Wormhole

The wormhole affix is among the most creative ones - the mob spawns two portals (wormholes) on the ground. If you step on one of them, you get teleported out of the other. Usually it's not fatal, just annoying, mainly for classes like the Wizard for example.

Poison Enchanted

The poison enchanted monsters do pretty much the same of what the monsters with the "Plagued" affix do: they spread poison on the ground. While the old one spawn poisonous pools though, the new affix lets mobs spread poison in long straight lines on the ground. There are usually a big number of lines crossing each other, so the ground becomes covered with a sort of a poisonous net.

Orbiter

The monsters with an "Orbiter" affix spawn one big lightning orb and many smaller orbs which orbit around the big orb (yes, the word "orb" has a lot to do with it). While you can avoid the orbs hitting you, at some point it's pretty hard to do so due to the enormous number of smaller orbs floating around. It's not very lethal as well.

Here is a short video, showing all of the three affixes, mentioned above, in action. The wormhole's effect is demonstrated around the 6th second, the orbits are spawned around the 3rd second and the poison enchantment is visible from the 12th second on.

Thunderstorm

The thunderstorm affix is among the very dangerous ones, especially to "glass cannon" classes like the Witch Doctor in this case. It ignores the "tanking" creatures/allies, because it strikes all opponents, which can cost your character's life depending on the difficulty and/or remaining health. You can see several thunderstorm strikes (the blue lightning) in the following video (it's very easy to spot on the 17th second):

Frozen Pulse

Same as the Poison Enchanted affix, the Frozen Pulse already has a "relative" among the old affixes - "Frozen". While the Frozen affix spawns several "ice bombs", frozen pulse spawns several "ice beacons" that pulse for about 10 seconds, but only damaging characters in its range. Here is a video representation of this affix. Its effect is easier to see near the end of the video - after the 40th second:

PTR Might Be Coming "Soon"
What Grimiku is talking about here is the pre-expansion patch and not the expansion itself.

According to Devs and their description, a WD is more of a ranged attacker, and should not be limited to a cloud of bats 8 yrds wide for example to clear the highest content in the game.
I'd say that Reaper of Souls will help build diversity for Witch Doctors on every difficulty level. For example, getting close to your enemies to hit them with Cloud of Bats is a lot riskier when you subtract Life Steal from the equation, and will likely influence the player's decision to use that spell. Also, when you consider some of the updates made in Reaper of Souls (like the loss of Life Steal, damage buffs to other skills, and new Legendary affixes), then it starts to look like Witch Doctors will have a greater variety of viable skill choices.

We plan to launch our patch 2.0.1 Public Test Region soon, and it will include class changes and balancing. Keep an eye out for the PTR to test the class changes out for yourself, and you can read a little more about it in this blog if you're interested. We'll be keeping a close eye on things as Reaper of Souls progresses, so be sure to leave us your feedback.

Am I the only one who thinks that the new gear tiers seem very hack-y in terms of originality? Monk T17 (Ascended), for example. The helm resembles Monk Sovereign mixed with Barbarian Archon. The shoulders look very much like Barbarian Sovereign. The boots also look like Monk Sovereign. The chest looks fairly unique, and the pants are fairly indistinguishable anyways.

Crusader T17 and T18, DH T17, WD T17 and T18, Wizard T18, and Barbarian T17 and T18 are all guilty, too. Some of the Crusader sets also look copy-pasted over from other classes (Monk Balor, DH Sovereign, Barb Doom). I'll be kind of disappointed if these (both offenders above) end up as the final versions.

As is said in the article itself a lot of these things are placeholders, but since they're also new we decided to showcase them. That way if they get changed we'll have the old ones to look back to and mention how much better they were.

Truthfully all of these sets might change. If you remember a week ago Blizzard released a new Demon Hunter set on Facebook, but the set is not in the game, instead the DH uses the same sets every other class has, with the inclusion of more Demon Hunter-y things like spikes on the helm.

We've no idea what will happen with these visuals, but decided it would be nice to include them in an article, as personally we love them quite a bit.

Why the hell did you decide to make both the Blizz tracker and Recent Posts tracker smaller? Makes no sense.
I'm also not a fan of the fact that every single font is bold.
Change for the sake of change......

Why the hell did you decide to make both the Blizz tracker and Recent Posts tracker smaller? Makes no sense.
I'm also not a fan of the fact that every single font is bold.
Change for the sake of change......

Oh, hello! Our feedback topic has been online for some time now! Maybe go check it out!